Nikolaos Tsagkas

PhD candidate @ University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Centre for Robotics

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Informatics Forum,

10 Crichton Street,

Edinburgh, EH8 9AB

I am a PhD candidate, at the School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh, sponsored by the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. I am privileged to be advised by Prof. Chris Xiaoxuan Lu (UCL) and Prof. Oisin Mac Aodha (UoE). My research interests revolve around the use of pre-trained visual representations in robot learning.

In November 2021, I completed with distinction the Artificial Intelligence master’s programme at the University of Edinburgh, where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Chris Williams on the topic of inference and learning for generative capsule models. Before that, I worked for a year as a Data Scientist at Ernst & Young. In August 2019, I was awarded the Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, in Greece (graduated 4th in my class out of 202 students – GPA: 8.11 out of 10). I completed my ECE Diploma thesis under the supervision of Prof. Athanassios Skodras, researching real-time hand-gesture recognition via sEMG signals.

:loudspeaker: News: I will be presenting my work at IROS’24 in Abu Dhabi, followed by the BMVA Symposium: Robotics Foundation & World Models in London. Come say hi if you’re there!

Publications

  1. pvrobo_thumbnail_distractors_short.gif
    When Pre-trained Visual Representations Fall Short: Limitations in Visuo-Motor Robot Learning
    Nikolaos Tsagkas , Andreas Sochopoulos , Duolikun Danier , Chris Xiaoxuan Lu , and Oisin Mac Aodha
    In ArXiv Preprint , 2025
    arXiv HTML Code
  2. affordance_thumbnail_150.gif
    Learning Precise Affordances from Egocentric Videos for Robotic Manipulation
    Gen Li , Nikolaos Tsagkas , Jifei Song , Ruaridh Mon-Williams , Sethu Vijayakumar , Kun Shao , and Laura Sevilla-Lara
    In ArXiv Preprint , 2024
    arXiv HTML
  3. c2g_thumbnail_150.gif
    Click to Grasp: Zero-Shot Precise Manipulation via Visual Diffusion Descriptors [Oral Pitch + Poster]
    Nikolaos Tsagkas , Jack Rome , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Oisin Mac Aodha , and Chris Xiaoxuan Lu
    In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Abu Dhabi, UAE , 2024
    arXiv HTML Code
  4. vl-fields_thumbnail.gif
    VL-Fields: Towards Language-Grounded Neural Implicit Spatial Representations [Spotlight Talk + Poster]
    Nikolaos Tsagkas , Oisin Mac Aodha , and Chris Xiaoxuan Lu
    In ICRA Workshops, London, UK , 2023
    arXiv HTML
  5. ecgm_thumbnail.gif
    Inference and Learning for Generative Capsule Models
    Alfredo Nazabal* , Nikolaos Tsagkas* , and Christopher K. I. Williams
    Neural Computation, 2023
    arXiv Code
  6. semg_thumbnail.gif
    On the Use of Deeper CNNs in Hand Gesture Recognition Based on sEMG Signals [Oral Presentation]
    Nikolaos Tsagkas , Panagiotis Tsinganos , and Athanassios Skodras
    In 10th International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA), Patras, Greece , 2019
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